Friday, December 18, 1981

General state

Big drama. Dad was on at six and got up to discover the pipes frozen. Mum rang the Water Authority and was in a general state until she left for work at eight.

I went to school late and found most people still away. I didn’t see Claire until break and there was sort of a negative, everything ending feel to the afternoon as it wound down to two-thirty. In Assembly we sang deliberately out of key, and I’ll miss everyone over the holidays. At one point, Claire were going to come to my house but never did: instead I walked home with Lee and played him the Talisman 12”.

The water was running again by the time Dad got home. The pipes weren't frozen but a tap under the sink was closed and when Mum got home late (all the buses were full so she'd had to walk), a huge argument exploded between the two of them over nothing at all. Mum ended up crying. All evening I was possessed by a despondent sort of remorse, a nostalgia almost. I felt reflective. The only hopeful note was Andrew’s suggestion that I go to Denmark with him next year.

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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